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Illinois Republican primary results: 5 takeaways

Romney will pick up the bulk of Illinois' delegates after his big win. | AP Photo

Assuming something unexpected doesn’t happen, Romney may well end up securing the nomination without strongly winning over the base of his party. That doesn’t preclude the possibility that he will begin to do better with the most conservative voters in his party (especially evangelicals), but he is still making up ground. And the fact that turnout was low in Illinois will foster the narrative, fairly or not, that people just aren’t excited to vote for him.

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Romney and his allies outspent Santorum heavily in Illinois, and it worked: The negative ads aired by the campaign and by the super PAC supporting the front-runner ground down the insurgent’s favorables.

The spending battle is now heading to other states: Restore Our Future is buying heavily in Wisconsin, and Tuesday started purchasing time in Maryland and Washington, D.C., whose races also fall on April 3. Santorum isn’t even on the ballot in D.C., but other candidates are.

The super PAC has played a major role in helping Romney crush his rivals on the airwaves. And while Santorum and Gingrich both have supportive super PACs of their own, they haven’t been able to keep pace with Romney’s in terms of sheer dollars spent.

Super PACs have been one of the biggest stories of the 2012 cycle, and Tuesday night was no exception.

5) Santorum is fighting on many fronts

If you consider the loose alliance between Ron Paul and Mitt Romney, and reports in The Daily Beast about the two camps teaming up to thwart Santorum in the Missouri caucuses in terms of delegates, it becomes clear where the lines of battle fall.

Santorum, whose flaws as a candidate and operationally are well-documented but who has traveled farther in the primary race than anyone expected, is fighting Romney and a number of Romney allies. Those include Paul and, if not in fact then in practice, Newt Gingrich.

On the one hand, Gingrich’s ongoing presence in the race hurts Romney, because it makes it harder for him to get to 1,144 delegates. On the other hand, it helps because it splits the anti-Romney vote and prevents Santorum from doing better in close races.

Gingrich, for his part, made clear in a statement last night that he is not going to bow to the Romney spending edge and has no plans to call it a day and support Santorum. This means the race keeps going in some form for several more weeks.

Readers' Comments (76)

Republicans love crowning the next guy in line, no matter how bad that guy may be, but please let someone better butt into the line before 2016, otherwise we'll see the same clown car vomit out the losers from this election.

I really am astonished that someone as polarizing as Santorum is seriously in contention for the party's nomination. Has it been so long since 1964 that you've forgotten what it's like to be utterly humiliated at the polls because you chose a complete ideologue?

With oral arguments coming up next week, there are two questions I've been asking on these boards that nobody has been able to answer for me.

Every Republican candidate favors repealing the individual mandate (at a minimum). No surprises there. Here's my question: If that were to happen, what does your preferred candidate propose we do about the Mary Browns and Kent Snyders of the world?

Mary Brown is a person who really hates the individual mandate. She hates it so much she signed up as a lead plaintiff in the lawsuit to overturn it. She didn't have health insurance because she didn't want to pay for it. Unfortunately she also didn't want to pay her health care bills. She's happy to just leave them for the rest of us to pay.

Mary Brown, a 56-year-old Florida woman who owned a small auto repair shop but had no health insurance, became the lead plaintiff challenging President Obama's healthcare law because she was passionate about the issue.

Brown "doesn't have insurance. She doesn't want to pay for it. And she doesn't want the government to tell her she has to have it," said Karen Harned, a lawyer for the National Federation of Independent Business. Brown is a plaintiff in the federation's case, which the Supreme Court plans to hear later this month.

But court records reveal that Brown and her husband filed for bankruptcy last fall with $4,500 in unpaid medical bills.

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As far as welchers go, Mary Brown was a pretty small potato. Good thing she didn't have cancer or something, who knows for how much of her debt we would be on the hook. For example, former Ron Paul aide Kent Snyder. Kent's story is much more tragic but an important example of what will happen if we roll back the mandate. Kent wanted insurance, he just couldn't get it because of a pre-existing condition. Kent developed a very treatable pneumonia but didn't go to the doctor because of the lack of insurance. By the time he went to the emergency room, it was too late. He left behind $400,000 in medical bills. Since a fundraiser by his friends and family only manged to raise less than $35,000, that added another $360,000 to the uninsured tab that the rest of us will end up paying off. Now I guess his former employer would have saved the $400,000 and just let him die. But what about the other candidates? What is their plan for dealing with pre-existing conditions?

At a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, Paul took questions from reporters on Snyder, whose story surfaced in the press after Paul said in the last Republican debate that the government should not intervene even to save a comatose 30 year old who did not have insurance. As Gawker noted, Snyder died in June 2008 without health insurance, leaving behind $400,000 in bills. His friends and family set up a fund to raise money to pay off the debt. It’s not clear how much money they were able to raise: a site set up by Ron Paul aide Justine Lam to track the medical fund stopped updating in 2008 with only $34,870 in donations.

It's a long time till November. The way things are going, if the GOP candidates keep speaking in public (and they will), by the time the election rolls around, they will have alienated all but the most extreme fringe of the republican "base," and Obama will be re-elected by a landslide.

Considerations: All my predictions are based on the most recent polling available on RCP. Obviously some of the polls are very outdated. Where no polling was available I considered the demographics (for example splitting the vote approximately 3 ways in the South). I also took into consideration proportional "winner-take-all" vs proportional races.

In my opinion, many of these predictions are VERY modest towards Romney, and yet, even with that modesty I show Romney pulling ahead of the needed 1,141 votes (albeit by a slim margin and late in the race).

Most importantly, if both Gingrich and Santorum stay in the race until the end of the primaries there is no "realistic" way either of them can win the nomination and at this point they are spoilers. I'm not saying they need to get out - it's their choice, but the facts are facts.

Recent polling suggests that, even if Gingrich were to drop out, his supporters would roughly split their vote between Santorum and Romney, suggesting that Romney would get to the nomination even sooner.

Obviously this does not take into account things such as momentum, gaffes, major screw-ups, etc.

Please modify/correct as you see fit - I'd be interested to see what your predictions are.

Even though I'm a Romney supporter I tried to be objective based on the above criteria.

Mitt never met a government mandate he didn't like in the great tradition of big government knows best politicians.

Even in 2009 he was recommending Romneycare for the whole of the country in interviews and op-eds in newspaper.

Then there is his cheerleasing part when supporting bank bailouts.

Santorum if only he could stay on message could have brought Mitt down even when he was outspent by twelve times. The millions of negative attack ads Romney has run against his opponents is really something.

Mr. Romney would be a disaster as president. Mr. Santorum would be a catostrophy. About the worst the Republicans could come up with at a brokered convention would be the dream team of Represenative Eric Cantor and Represenative Paul Ryan. This is a bankrupt party pushing for tax cuts for the already well off. And Mr. Romney actually believes HE is fighting for freedom? Crazy doesn't make sense - that's why we call it crazy.

schymtz: "This is a bankrupt party pushing for tax cuts for the already well off."

And you're pushing for tax increases on the poor and downtrodden. How do we get out of the massive hole that obysmal has dug for this country if we refuse to employ time tested methods of getting the economy going? Please, let's hear your solutions.

While the reporters are doing their "on-scene" interviews and writing about "take-aways" from IL, just a couple states away, union construction workers are preparing a protest. Will these eager reporters file stories on that like the local reporters do?

Pres. Obama is going to OK to do a press conference telling America he supports oil, supports pipelines, and wants to lower gas prices. But the union members in OK that work in energy, know the President is simply lying! And they plan to protest his visit, as they should.

Pres. Obama might be able to fool some of the people, mostly progressives, all of the time, he can't fool everybody every time. And the time when Pres. Obama could fool the majority is long past. They have seen behind his mask. They know his tricks. They are more informed on the issues than ever before for any election.